Despite their avid use of spatial metaphors in conceptualizing different kinds of democratic practices, political theorists, have tended to conceptualize space in physiocentric terms: as a natural, given, physical container within which physical bodies move. This framework, I suggested, is what has contributed to the construction of size (territory and population) as a limiting condition in democratic theory: the perennial problem of scale. This fetish about size creates a kind of conceptual impasse, generally committing theorists to a single position somewhere along the “democratic corridor”. The common premise is that participation by citizens is a face-to-face affair. Consequently, citizen participation is most active in a small-scale community and, of necessity, least active in a large-scale society, where the business of administering government is, therefore, best left to elected representatives.
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If, however, we understand, following Lefebvre, that social spaces are socially produced, then different ways of conceptualizing participatory spaces become possible. Barber’s sense that political community is grounded in a space of communication (1984, 246‒48) contributes to this understanding, although he winds up, yet again, privileging face-to-face encounters in neighborhood assemblies as the font of an illusive intimacy and social bond that ostensibly are necessary qualities for the exercise of civic virtue. I am not suggesting we eschew the search for the source, quality, and even the meaning of “civic virtue,” but part of what I find problematic about this enterprise is that it often leads theorists to make a number of normative claims about the kinds of relationships in which people should invest themselves for the sake of a “return” to a more enriching, because participatory, democratic idyll (Shulman 1983). Lamenting the so-called loss of small, associational spaces and then proposing some sort of (ultimately utopian) return to them is a fruitless endeavor. Instead of dictating where people should situate themselves in order to become more civic minded, something of the ethnographic spirit of “following the natives” (to put it indelicately) is needed in democratic political theory. As the foregoing analysis indicates, political theorists should perhaps begin by rethinking their conception of space. Social spaces are not simply physical; they are also produced by how we imagine them and by how we inhabit them. The analysis of hardware and software suggests that we need, as well, to broaden our understandings of the physical.Our studies should include not just spatial practices engendered by the movements of atoms and bodies, but also those involving the movements of electrons and bits, which include transnational data transmissions, speedy movements, perfect copies, invisible electrical flows, and indirect effects.Having rethought what counts as a social space, theorists might then do well to explore those currently existing social spaces where different kinds of people are every day constructing sometimes new frameworks of sociality (some face-to-face, some not).
One additional consequence of the sense that social spaces are socially produced is that such spaces tend to proliferate. If, then, democratic politics are always closely linked to the social spaces through which they occur, then it may be a little shortsighted for theorists to advocate one kind of democratic practice as the best or truest form of democracy.What we may find, in fact, is that we have been, all along, practicing a kind of mixed democracy: a combination of participatory democracy in some social spaces (not necessarily small, local, face-to-face spaces) and of representative democracy in other social spaces (again, not necessarily large, national, impersonal spaces). This implies a less unitary sense of public, political space: indeed, what it calls for is a sense of “a multiplicity of publics” and the need to “theorize the relations among them” (Fraser
1993, 136‒37). Looking at the ways in which electronic networking spaces overlie and become part of our conventional social spaces may help us to theorize these relations among multiple publics.As the concept of heterotopia ultimately foregrounds, social spaces cannot really be studied in isolation from each other (assuming even that one can carefully delineate their boundaries). Rather, more is learned about political practices and possibilities by analyzing the ways social spaces impact on each other.
In particular, the concept of heterotopia suggests ways in which a spatial theory of social change might be developed. My analysis gestures toward that. It offers a view of cyberspace as a space of “an alternate ordering” (Hetherington 1997, 9), where, because different spatial practices, concepts, and uses are at work than in conventionally physical spaces, that comparison or juxtaposition between physical and virtual can provide, in Foucault’s words, “a pure experience of order” (1994b, xxi). It can bring to awareness the process of ordering itself, calling into question what might have seemed fairly “concrete” assumptions about the orders of physical space. Like Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone (arguably another kind of heterotopic space), the productive ambiguities of cyberspace have “submitted for your consideration” a number of core concepts in political and social theory, including the very meanings of participation, of face-to-face, of here and there, and even of self. I am not suggesting, as have some observers (both critics and pundits), that cyberspace has created a state of chaos for everything we used to hold dear. Rather, as Hetherington suggests, a heterotopia provides new instances of both freedom and order.We may find ourselves “free” from some of the dictates of the movement of atoms (e.g., bodiless), but the flow of electrons in cyberspace follows certain orders as well, and it is the nature and impact of this different ordering that must be researched more fully.
From : From : Saco, Diana. Cybering Democracy: Public Space and The Internet. University of Minnesota Press. 2002. (page : 200-202)
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